Wednesday, 3 April 2013

This book has it all. Vast galactic empire on the edge of
collapse, space battles, aliens, space pirates, rebellions, philosophy,
plausible pseudoscience, traction cities (decades before Reeve) that roam the
dried up sea beds of Earth, escape pods followed down to a planet where storm
troopers go in search of fugitives (sound familiar?), great helpings of satire
(along with pigs taking over the empire decades before Angry Birds), all wrapped
inside 55,000 words.

Bayley is really good at this sort of thing. He knows his
pulp sci fi inside out and squeezes every last drop out of it to build familiar
landscapes with a few deft sentences so he can get on with the meat of the
story. And what precisely is that? ‘Nothing moves. Where would it go?’

Bayley didn’t write conventional stories. He pulled dense
handfuls out of alternate universes and arrayed them before us for our
amusement and edification. He takes ideas and examines them (almost like the
aliens in this book), turning them upside down and inside out, pulling them
apart, reassembling them in different ways, mixing them, so that by the time
you get to the end of your 150 pages you feel like you have read 1500. This was
his skill as a writer. Something we could do with more of these days because I
would rather read this than some bloated space opera that goes on and on with
ideas as rare as atoms of hydrogen in deep space.

As well as being able to condense his work in this
phenomenal way, Bayley was also a master at creating atmosphere and
strangeness. His aliens are truly alien, even those that share our universe.
His future cities are not just bigger, taller versions of our own, his
technology is well thought out and does not feel dated, and he has a sense of
fun. There is a smile in his work that is so often missing from a lot of
writing.

I went drinking with Bayley back in the late ‘70s, so I’m
probably biased, because he was a great bloke. His work always deserved to be
better known. At least it is now (most of it) available in ebook form. Take a
look.

Maigret And The Flea – Georges Simenon

A standard Maigret, but none the worse for that. These are
not about convoluted plots (most real-life murders are straightforward), but
about the people involved. In this case small time gangsters who are so cocky
they think they are untouchable but who crack once the pressure is applied. The
characterisations are superbly done and it is always a joy to read Simenon
because he packs so much in to so few words.

Foam Of The Daze (L’Écume des jours) – Boris Vian

To get an understanding of this book you have to go and
watch some old black and white Betty Boop cartoons – Jazz, surrealism, and
bizarre storylines. Indeed, you have to wonder what the artists were taking.
The same goes for this book. Indeed, reads as if it were a treatment for just
such a cartoon. The characters live in a world that has no real connection with
reality other than as a strating point for people, places, and events that in a
cartoon would make you smile, but as words on the page seem truly unusual and
at times macabre.

That, on its own, would not be enough to sustain an entire
novel. Here we have a number of layers, at the heart of which is a tragic love
story. This too is surreal in the extreme, yet nonetheless touching for that
(and in some ways, because it is stripped of the usual for of sentiment, it is
far more poignant than it would have been if presented as a straightforward
narrative). There is also a sustained expose of obsession and the industries
that grow up to feed those offlicted (in this case it is the obsessive cult
growing up around a philosopher named Jean-Sol Partre, with devotees scrabbling
about trying to buy every last publication, every last recording, even used
underpants).

I struggled through a battered copy of the original with
dictionaries at hand, back in early 80s. I also came across a translation(which these days is almost impossible to
find unless, ironically, you are prepared to pay over huge sums of money). I
wish I had kept that early translation because although it has been good to
read this again, this new version is crap. It might be technically accurate and
based on a revised version of the original, but it has no soul and the thing I
remember about the original and the translation I read was how gripping it was.
The excuse given for the dullness and for the endless notes is that Vian used a
lot of puns and obscure references. But a good translator will be able to
reproduce all the vitality and playfulness of the original. For all that, it is
still worth a read if only to remind ourselves that there are forms of
literature that rarely get a look in these days.

Maigret And The Lazy Burglar – Georges Simenon

A fascinating character study built up of a murder victim,
the lazy burglar of the title. A man who never hurt anyone, who was never
violent, who led a secret life, and who was such an expert he never left signs
of having been in the houses he had burgled. Except for the last time when something
goes wrong.

Maigret uncovers what happened and knows from the slender
evidence he has collected (he is not even officially on the case) that an
arrest will never be made. The investigation into the murder (paralleled by an
official investigation into a series of robberies) is also a look at the ways
in which policing was changing. Maigret was getting close to retirement and all
around him, the bureaucrats and lawyers were taking over, people who have no
idea of how policing works, who have no knowledge of the streets, who have
devised a penal code in which murder is not considered until all the crimes
against property and money.

Although the law cannot serve the lazy burglar, someone with
whom Maigret felt an affinity, justice does. Maigret makes sure of that in his
own quiet way.

Maigret And The Millionaires – Georges Simenon

Maigret is rarely comfortable around the wealthy or the
elite, even though he grew up on a large estate. Or maybe because he grew up on
a large estate. The problem is, as a working man from a working background, he
finds it difficult to understand people whose lives are spent filling in the
time, moving restlessly from place to place, living in hotels, helpless as
babies as everything is done for them. In the end, however, that turns out to
be the key, and after travelling across half of western Europe Maigret returns
to the scene of the crime and more familiar haunts where he starts afresh and
solves the case.

Once again this a pyschological study of privilege, of
infantilism, and of the low esteem in which life is held when compared with
money. Atmospheric, it captures both sides of the door in the grand hotels in
which the privileged live and strips away all the pretensions of the rich to
show them as being exactly the same as everyone else.

Maigret And The Gangsters – Georges Simenon

More action than is normal for a Maigret, this is about a
collision of cultures. An American criminal is on the run having witnessed a
gang murder. The gangsters send hit men to get to the witness before he can be
persuaded to return and give evidence. This happens on Maigret’s patch and he
is less than pleased that the Americans assume they can play out their domestic
squabbles in another country without so much as a hint as to what is going on.
The result is to harden Maigret’s resolve and to bring down the gangsters,
which he does in style.

Maigret’s Christmas – Georges Simenon

A collection of short stories. This being Simenon, ‘short’
is a relative term. Most of his Maigret novels were about 40,000 words in
length. And in fact one of the short stories in this collection is in fact a
novel. But length is immaterial. Simenon can pack more into a short story than
most writers can fit into a 100,000 word book. And all of these stories are
Simenon at his best.

Even the story in which Maigret does not appear (it is set
in the Police Emergency Control Room with a number of secondary characters and
forms a companion piece to the title story) has Simenon’s trademark melding of
an intriguing story with a detailed character portrait, all done through the
medium of telephone calls and meetings in the one room.

Through his stories and through his character studies, an
intimate picture of Paris is slowly built up, layer on layer until you are
convinced you could walk down any Paris street and know what is going on behind
the doors and windows. It is a fiction, of course, but only insofar as any life
is a work of fiction, told and retold to bring some narrative sense to where
none exists other than in brief flashes.

Popular writing at its very best. Accessible and insightful.

Maigret And Monsieur Charles – Georges Simenon

It is clear by now that I’m a Simenon fan. More specifically
a Maigret fan, although I do like his other work. This involves a missing high society
solicitor whose body is eventually fished out of the Seine. As with many other
Maigret’s there is no convoluted twisting. As in real life, the solution is
fairly simple; it is the finding of the evidence and the studying of those
involved in the case that Simenon does so well. His portraits of people,
especially their inner lives which are so often at odds with their material
existence, are always pin sharp. And in this we see how the expectations of one
person and the refusal to accept responsibility on the part of another lead to
the tragic downfall of a woman. Heartbreaking. And perhaps a fitting last
Maigret novel.

Maigret And The Dosser – Georges Simenon

Much like the previous book there is an element of
protecting what one loves, of going beyond the limits to fight for what one
values. In this case, a dosser, one of the ones who sleeps under the bridges
that cross the Seine is attacked and thrown in the river. His cries for help
rouse some bargees and he is rescued. Uncovering the identity of the dosser and
how that links with the attack is a prime example of what makes Simenon’s work
so good. The fact that this character is a down and out does not obscure his
very real story and the wholly credible reasons for him being where he is and
behaving as he does.

Although Maigret ends up knowing why he was attacked and the
crimes that lie behind it, there is not enough evidence to arrest anyone. The
attacker goes free, yet in the end there is a sense of a bond between Maigret
and the victim as well as a sense of understanding that Maigret feels is more
than compensation for the loss of an arrest.

Maigret And The Hotel Majestic – Georges Simenon

Brilliant!

Notes From The Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky

The whining of a miserable scrote. Waste of an evening’s
reading.

Maigret And The Ghost – Georges Simenon

Excellent.

Factotum – Charles Bukowski

Harder edged than Post Office, some of those edges
jagged. There are parts of the book that make you step back, that make you
laugh, but most of all they make you cry. This kind of life is a reality for so
many people. Bukowski skillfully portrays the tedium and pointlessness of most
work; of the destruction of the soul and how it drags down everything else as
it crumbles. That he was able to turn this into such a brutal and lyrical
portrait is writing at its very best. That he survived such a life to be able
to write about it is a blessing.

The Star Virus – Barrington J Bayley

Space opera at its best. But that’s what you expect from
Bayley. And as always he packs more into 120 pages than most other writers
could squeeze into a twenty volume series. Action, philosophy, ideas (no, the
two are not the same), two colliding ‘empires’ and an ancient race long since
gone but still affecting the lives of everyone in the galaxy. And characters.
Real ones, with whole lives as ghostly afterimages trailing out behind them.
Even the slave singer toward the end who appears for just a few pages. In that
very brief encounter, there is so much backstory without the slightest hiccup
in the forward story. And the central concept, that humans are a virus, sounds
hackneyed now, but it was new back than and is used here with subtlety. Bayley
might easily have made a longer novel of this, but it would all have been
padding, and he was far too good a writer ever to do that.

Maigret’s Revolver – Georges Simenon

Spot on. And one of those novels in which Maigret does not
get his ‘man’.

The Song Of Phaid The Gambler – Mick Farren

Farren is an original. His writing can be unusual and it is
no surprise some of it is now out of print (although it really shouldn’t be –
he was doing modern vampires long before Rice and Whedon). This is a
post-apocalyptic fantasy, a road novel, a picaresque. Less way out than the DNA
Cowboys, it offers a unique and dirty vision of the future.

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